Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
I didn't like the gifs, because I dislike all technical posts with gifs and memes, but the writing is good.
The Internet of Unprofitable Things
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Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#22What RTC drifts so much in a week (or even a year) as to throw off lighting or HVAC controls timing?
An RTC chip without temperature compensation in an extremely variable temperature environment.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#23It's referenced in the article, but one of the earlier ntp abuse cases:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/
Makes for interesting reading.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#24Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
Yes.
Also, I used to work in IoT, and you are fortunate with your outcome. So many OEMs are worse.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#25What RTC drifts so much in a week (or even a year) as to throw off lighting or HVAC controls timing?
Ugh. So many.
There are tons of different RTCs you can get. Sometimes you don’t really have an “RTC” as much as you have an RC oscillator and a guess at what its frequency should be. A simple crystal oscillator could be as bad as 200 ppm, or five minutes per fortnight. RC oscillators are worse.
Decent wristwatches generally have temperature compensated crystal oscillators (TCXO) which can be calibrated at the factory, often by adjusting the counter values periodically (e.g. every N counts, add X to the counter). NTP is better than this, but only if you run it as a daemon.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#26Question for people who read the link- Do you like the writing style and inclusion of gifs?
I enjoyed it.
Is it practical for you to only play the animations on mouse over, and pause them otherwise? I think that might allow us the entertainment value of the gifs, without the annoyance of them looping endlessly while we're trying to read.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#27I'm trying to coin "Postel decentralisation" for things like this: people assume NTP is a distributed robust system, but in practice it turns out to be run by one very overwhelmed guy in a basement somewhere.
(It could have been set up properly to be distributed here, but they didn't do it)
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
His argument is likely that you shouldn't have to when a simple explanation could fit into the article.
But it's not an "article". It's a blog post. An informal post, written informally, for an obviously technical audience. I very, very rarely explain what "AWS" is when I'm casually writing about cloud stuff. It's table stakes. You should know, or you aren't gonna appreciate reading it anyway.
I agree with you but if you take the time to just maybe write out an acronym once its much easier for us who aren't quite there yet technically to understand the context instead of having to search for 4-5 terms. This gives us a chance to enjoy the write up and gives it maybe a broader audience.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#29Good on the author for playing nice with them. Hardcoding IPs for any purpose is a bad idea, this is literally the reason DNS exists.
Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things
#301. 70 GBP/hr seemed like a low rate for a consultant (what’s an electrician or a plumber cost on a subscription contract?). I’m glad author doubled it.
What happened to NetThing’s customers after they ceased trading? Who took over the lighting management of the car parks etc. ?